


oh, devil

by Goldmonger



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Titans (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Isolation, Suicidal Thoughts, stop making batkids cry 2k19
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-24 11:04:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21098435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goldmonger/pseuds/Goldmonger
Summary: He's a whetted knife, a live wire, a lit fuse.





	oh, devil

**Author's Note:**

> Set just before the final scene of 2x07.
> 
> Title from the song by [Electric Guest](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWc9hvNV3ko)
> 
> ***

He imagines throwing punches, skin connecting with skin the way it had on the street: a brief flare of pain, a spray of blood at the end of his arm. It had been like a game. Press the button, watch the teeth fly.

Three weeks after landing himself in Wayne Manor, and subsequently the Batcave, Bruce had tried to teach him Aikido.

“You redirect your opponent’s attack,” he explained. “The goal is to orient yourself around their violence, not through it.”

Jason realises now it was a protective strategy. An attempt to keep the new Boy Wonder stalling the bad guys for time until the Bat shows up; a little bird bumping ineffectually at the window until the mythological hellbeast springs from the shadows unbidden, fangs gnashing with a taste for henchman flesh.

He remembers the endless blocking, practising jerking from side to side and ducking under jabs that Bruce insisted would have bruised his windpipe, shattered his collarbone, burst an eyeball. After an hour of this, sweat-soaked and panting, his spine aching from leaning back, always angled away from the fight, Jason snapped, striking forwards to land his benefactor with a bloody nose. It should have broken like cheap china, because Jason was fast; Bruce, fortunately, was faster.

“We’ll try something else,” he said, dryly, and from then on they sparred like equals, Bruce imparting his own fair share of lessons in every shade of the rainbow: flecks of red in Muay Thai and Krav Maga; blooms of violet and blue in mixed martial arts learned from the duelling pits of Bialya; the ropy pink of pulsing blood vessels choked into submission by a vicious Taekwondo strain prevalent in Qurac.

“You’re a fighter,” Bruce told him one day, when months of this had rendered Jason’s body taut as a drawn bow, jittery with energy that had nowhere to go. Bruce had a split cheekbone from a run-in with Scarecrow the night before, and a sudden spike of rage had Jason picturing that button again, pulling back and letting go, the arcing blood, the certainty that nobody would touch him. He would be the fluttering bird that flew directly into the face of the enemy, the flashbang that blinded them to the Big Bad Bat.

He wasn’t on the street anymore. He was now unyielding metal against the pallid skin of the enemies that flowed through Gotham like untreated sewage.

He kept pressing the button. Blood, in specks and gushes under his fist, the Batman’s gloved hand on his shoulder, against the back of his neck. “They’re down, Robin. They’re done.”

Two hundred feet in the air, with wind rushing around you as thick as cascading water, there’s nothing to fight. His arms swung out and caught nothing. His legs cycled futilely against the endless pull of gravity, Dick’s face retreating into the night sky along with his roar, his perennially serene exterior cracked, just a bit. Jason wonders if the reason for his panic had been the idea of having to report to Bruce that all the time he had invested in the new Robin had been a waste. Should have stuck to the original model. Oh well. At least he got an updated suit out of Bruce’s most recent foray into philanthropy.

Now, the breeze on his face is cool, feather-light and almost silent. If he were to fall, again, he may not have time to be afraid, to reach out for Dick like a child lost in a crowd. The tower is tall, but he imagines the relief of the final punch thrown, the quiet that would come of disassembling the button altogether.

His converse rasp against the stone of the cornice, peeking just over the edge to the forty-storey drop. He looks at the sky instead, over the rise of skyscrapers that glint sliver and chrome in the sunlight. So different from Gotham, where everything was done in the dark, even the good. The smog that hung over the city in a dense pall was a smokescreen for them as much as it was for rat bastards like the Joker, though no-one was going to go out of their way to criticise vigilante justice when the alternative was a mouthful of noxious laughing gas.

There’s a part of him that misses it – kicking every kind of ass with Batman, being a companion to Bruce, a bulwark of the city. A stalwart warrior. A tank that can be sustained on one or two words of praise from his mentor, from that restraining hand, from a body that pushes in front of his to take the next bullet.

There’s another part of him, a smaller part with a reedy voice that’s all sharp corners and painfully stretching bones with hairline fractures, and it wants to skip alongside Dick and his merry band of assholes. It wants a little sister, a best friend, someone who would leap out of nowhere to rip him away from death just because he wanted to help.

It’s an agony, to meet your brother after decades, to plumb his shadow for your shared father’s affection, for your new team’s camaraderie. Jason’s tears have dried in the altitudinous air, but he can feel a faint stinging in his eyes when he remembers Dick turning away in the gymnasium, Dick’s face a distant harvest moon as he plummeted to the ground, Dick’s eyes turned on him, dark and resentful at the reminder of what his legacy had become.

Jason is a grenade, ensconced in bramble, wrapped in barbed wire. He hates that he responds to questions about his health with a shove, that he can’t playact a fight without making it a contest, without the throttling need to prove something. He’d slapped away Dick’s outstretched hand, snarled at Gar’s open smile, joked about the actual demons crawling up some poor kid’s back until they finally struck out.

_You’re a fighter._ Bruce had blood between his teeth when he said that, the smile grisly, thrilling, the hand gripping his shoulder, his thumb pressing into the divot beneath his clavicle like he was the one searching for a button to press. A way to wind him up and send him into the fray. Jason was a fighter, so he would fight everything and everyone, and when that stopped working, it was time for him to stop working.

He wants to tell them all. He wants to explain –

_I’m a fighter_, he would say, earnest, and when they tilted their heads in confusion, scowled in revulsion at his inadequacies, he would seek out Dick, because Dick knew Bruce, he knew Batman even better, and that prepubescent voice hidden beneath would try out that new, extraordinary word, _brother, please, make them understand_ –

But the blood hadn’t stopped flowing. There's too much now, trailing after Jason in broken jaws and skulls punctured like eggs. Jason hadn’t minded tracking blood over Dick’s brand new tower – it was part of the gig, even the Batman knew that. They all did. But that blood had seeped into the earth and putrefied into a spectre of death that clung to them all like a hovering disease. He isn’t blind. He knows Dick and his old team have secrets, blackly cruel ones that had brought another killer to their doorstep. But Jason knows he's different. There is something following him, something that makes his flying fists and filthy mouth and pitched insults necessary.

Who protects the protector? What protects them, in turn?

A fluttering bird. Jason’s foot skids slightly on the edge of the rooftop, the raised cresting stopping its momentum only just. Behind him, there is the creak of a door hinge, the inaudible steps of a trawler of the night, of someone used to tiptoeing into the unknown, the deadly.

He imagines falling.

“Jason.”

He imagines a hand reaching out, clasping, and holding on this time.

**Author's Note:**

> ***
> 
> ..... @ titans writers stop hurting jason or die by my sword


End file.
